Survive

Black Blade, Red Liquid

Francisco Ermita-

A 17 year-old boy standing at 171 centimeters, sporting messy black hair and black eyes. He was born in Pangasinan on March 17, 2025 and raised in Nueva Ecija during most of his life. When the Philippine economy collapsed, Francisco and his parents tried to move to Tarlac. On the way, their car was stampeded over by carabaos. He was the only survivor.

His past is all but a mere shadow as he attempts to survive in a world razed by mutants. Everyday, Francisco wanders around the wasteland that was once called the Philippines searching for valuable items that could be salvaged. He lives at a degraded house somewhere near the village of Mayantoc in the Central areas of Luzon, the Philippines' largest island. Along with four other people, Francisco tries his best to not die early at the hands of inhuman creatures and inhumane humans.

"Wake up!"

This marks the start of Francisco's morning routine. Being shouted at by a girl almost as old as him. His eyes open to see the ever-unchanging view of a wooden ceiling with chipped-off paint. He was lying down on a mattress on the floor of a small bedroom. There were three open jalousie windows lining one side of the old bedroom and an electric floor fan at a corner, swinging its head around to circulate air around the room.

"Okay, okay, wait." He said as he stretched his body. He stood up and put on a green cotton shirt as per every morning that he wakes up, since he sleeps shirtless. The girl who serves as his alarm clock is the sixteen-year old Calliope Castelo, a averagely tall girl with brown eyes and chest-length black hair.  A girl with very little outfit combinations, Calliope normally wears an indigo-colored windbreaker on top of a sleeveless undershirt and an old brown skirt originally from the school uniform of an unknown girl that they tried to nurse back to a stable state but eventually died of bloodloss from a much larger wound than the one they tried to patch up.

Calliope put her hands inside of her windbreaker pockets. "Come on, Isko." She grabbed Francisco's pants from above a desk and threw it at him. "Kuya Ron wants us to get stuff." Francisco caught the pants with his left hand and wore it over his boxer shorts. He followed Calliope out of the bedroom and out to a short hallway with three doors. The door opposite of the one they came out of was the door to a different bedroom. The door adjacent to the right of their door was for the bathroom.

To their left was the house kitchen. There was a working refrigerator there, along with a gas stove and a microwave oven. Ahead was a living room with a couch that had very uncomfortable leather upholstery. Sitting on the couch was a tall man in his early twenties, Alfonso Garcia, tinkering with an old radio, something he has been doing for the past week. His goal is to convert the radio into a two-way one, but as the world came apart before he could finish his education as an electrical engineer, he's rather underqualified for the job of doing it.

"Al, what's your progress with the radio?" Francisco asked him. After a minute, Alfonso dropped his screwdriver looked up at him with a look of hopelessness. "Isko, I don't know what to do anymore." He plainly says. "I can't do anything to this thing." He stood up and kicked the coffee table that the disassembled radio was scattered on before heading to the kitchen.

"Al's been cranky because of his project." Calliope scratched her cheek and said to Francisco. "Don't worry though, he'll pull through somehow." She said hopefully, though her aversion to Francisco's eyes suggested otherwise. 

The two walked out to the front porch of the house. There lay a bunch of wooden planks and cutting tools. From here, one can already see the makeshift defenses put up around the house. A meter-high fence lined with barbed wire surrounding the house was the first line of defense. A bit more literal, the second line of defense was a thin line of concertina wire suspended a meter above the ground. These two worked really well in keeping the brainless infected away from the house, but it was useless against the smarter mutants.